The 5 Things Holding You Back from Success

There are a ton of things that are holding back entrepreneurs, but there are a few guilty of ending many careers. One thing they all have in common is not taking full responsibility for yourself or your business. By looking at these five and really doing some reflection, it will allow you to realize where you can really take full responsibility and therefore create real success.

1. Not Delegating. This is something that many entrepreneurs will never learn to do, which for some is a lack of self awareness, which will be discussed later, but it can be a killer in your business. If you are performing every task in your business and not empowering others, not only do you not have a business but you can never really scale it larger. If you really want to make it big, then it’s essential to learn the skill of delegating. As an entrepreneur, you are the visionary and you must know where you want to guide the company and put people in the correct place to make that happen.

2. Lack of Self Awareness. Gary Vaynerchuk has often touted self awareness as one of his biggest assets. In an article for Inc Magazine, Gary Stated: “Self-awareness allows people to recognize what things they do best so they can then go hard on those aspects of their life. It also helps you accept your weaknesses.” Self awareness means not kidding yourself, understanding who you are and your true skill set. If something is a skill learn how to play more with that and find others to handle the things you’re not so good at, it also has to do with your current situation.

Many young entrepreneurs are not honest with themselves and it kills them. If you want to get to an end goal, then you have to be honest with where you are starting, because without that honestly you can’t make a real game plan and you’re doomed from the start.

3. Being Self-Important. Are you rude to other people? Get angry over the little things? Think you’re the single greatest person to grace the planet? If you’re self important to the point that you’re rude to other people or feel the need to name drop at nauseating levels, then you will really be turning other people off. That’s not to say that confidence is bad, but cockiness at high level can be impossible to work with. Authenticity and humility are really important, because it really helps you empower other people to be the best version of themselves and most productive.

4. Pseudo Hustle. A ton of entrepreneurs don’t really know what hustle really is — it’s used because it makes them feel really cool. Hustle, itself, while admirable at the highest level, isn’t as pretty or glamorous as it’s made to seem. It’s finding something that works, that you can take total control of, and putting as much possible action towards it as you can. It could be hours spent knocking on doors or even hours spent on social media; whatever you can put a lot of non-specialized action into — that’s hustle.

5. Not being in it for the long game. This really comes down to vision. Many entrepreneurs are concerned with making this week’s pay, and refuse to take certain actions because of no immediate ROI. Yes, you need to be concerned with right now or you will burn out, but you also need need to have a vision far into the future. What does it look like 6 months from now, 1 year from now, 5 years from now and so on? The long game is what makes legacy, just ask the really successful ones like Elon Musk. What does yours look like?

If you notice something in common with the above, it’s all about mastering your inner game. It’s mastering who you are, how you organize and even how you think. Putting the five above failures into perspective, you can create a much more successful path for yourself. If you’ve already made some of those mistakes, it’s time to put them into perspective, be honest with yourself and find out how you can really move forward. It’s time to take total responsibility and then really take on your business full force.

Jeremy Slate is the founder of the Create Your Own Life Podcast which helps entrepreneurs live the lives they know they were meant to. He studied literature at Oxford University, specializes in using Online social networking to build and offline relationship, and was ranked #1 in iTunes New and Noteworthy. It is because of Jeremy’s success in podcasting that he was able to accomplish 10,000 downloads of his podcast in the first month. Jeremy is also an online marketing expert for Greater New York firm, ClearImages Design.